A Box of Memories
by flames and roses
Summary: Dante Folchart doesn't know why his sister is sad and his father is longing and his mother looks to the horizon wistfully. He doesn't understand the strange words and ideas they have, of 'cars' and 'computers'. But he knows if he can, he will do all in his power to hold them close, and keep from losing them to a dream. Oneshot for now, may become a twoshot. COMPLETE!


**A/N: So this is my plot bunny 'Flight', but renamed, because I thought of a better one. May become a twoshot one day, but... don't hold your breath.**

 **It's set from about seven years after _Inkdeath_ to about twenty years after it. Not much dialogue, a lot of thought. A kind of reflection on the effect leaving Earth to live in the Inkworld for good would have had on Meggie, Mo and Resa, from the point of view of Meggie's brother, born at the end of _Inkdeath_ (was revealed by Funke to be called Dante, even if he wasn't named in the book). **

**As canon as I could make it.**

A Box of Memories (Dante Folchart POV)

Dante Folchart didn't know why his sister Meggie sometimes looked at the picture with longing — the picture of four girls, smiling and waving as they looked forward. Behind them was a strange, shiny object, mostly red but with transparent shapes along the side and metal door handles and big glowing eyes on the front.

Meggie was in the picture, at the front, but she looked very different from the Meggie Dante knew. This Meggie wasn't wearing her normal, short, silky dark red dress, but instead a big, rough-looking brown coat that had little buttons sewn on. Her hair was long and pulled back in a ponytail with two bright green bands, different to her usual ribbon. The other girls were wearing similar clothes, and they all looked very happy.

Meggie called it a 'photo'.

When he was seven, Dante asked Meggie why she looked sad whenever she looked at the 'photo', Meggie just told him it was because she would never see any of them — the girls in it with her — again. Not really understanding, but sympathising, he slipped his little hand into hers.

"Were they your friends?" he asked quietly. Meggie nodded, and Dante reminded her that she had friends here, too.

"Yeah," she whispered, and squeezed his hand. "Thanks, kiddo."

To his shock, on his eighth birthday, Meggie gave him the prized photo, pressing it to his chest when his parents were not in the room, and told him to "keep it safe for me, for as long as you you can."

Dante took it up to his room, and that evening he crafted a small wooden box, decorating it with paintings of his family, and place the photo carefully in the box. He put on the lid and pushed it under his bed.

Occasionally over the next few years he would take it out to look at it. He would gaze at his sister and see the smile he had never seen her wear in his lifetime: a reckless, carefree sort of smile that displayed innocence that contradicted what he saw in her eyes nowadays. And it became his most prized possession.

The start of a collection.

Dante always watched when his father flipped through and filed and copied from all those books in the little light brown bookshelf next to his bed. He did it often, over and over. All the books there had strange names, names he had never seen anywhere else, even in the enormous library in Ombra castle.

When he padded with quiet feet and peered over his father's shoulder, he would see strange words on the pages like photograph and car and computer before his hot breath would cause him to be caught and his father would snap the book shut and leave the room with some distraction or another for him.

And when he slipped in without his father's knowledge and looked at the books by himself, he would find they had strange, impossibly smooth converse, strangely thin, see through and white pages and perfect text that didn't look at all handwritten, every letter identical to all the others of his kind.

And the stories themselves made no sense either, with incomprehensible vocabulary that was barely recognisable as English, and barely any pictures. He would strive to read a chapter or two, but never got very far.

And when Dante was ten and took his questions to his father, all Mo would say was that they from "another time and place that was lost to them now," then cast his eyes down, longing for all those out of reach books, before changing the subject.

Later that day, he snuck once again into Mo's study, and found the one book out of all the nonconventional book there that he could understand most of. It was about an innocent girl and a playful dog, who lost their home to a great destructive wind. They followed a yellow road to a great wizard with companions of a talking 'lion', which he surmised was some kind of great beast, who wanted courage, man made of metal who wanted a heart, and a man made of straw who wanted a mind.

And after reading it once more Dante reached under his bed and brought out his box, and he opened it and placed the book carefully next to the photo, so both were displayed, closed it, and pushed it back away.

And over the next few years he would take it out every six months or so and read it over and over, and he devoured the words about the girl and her dog searching for a way back home. And Dante wondered: if the little cottage was his own home, where was home for the rest of his family?

His mother was the one who seemed the most at home. She didn't have any strange objects or odd habits, really, that didn't fit in anywhere.

But sometimes, if Dante woke up especially early, he could look out the window and see his mother sitting on her wooden chair in the yard, staring off into the distance. And if she happened to have the chair facing the house, he could see her eyes, as wistful as Meggie or Mo's on their worst days.

They were deep and reflected a lost time and place, the one his father would mention, and Danter often longed to be a part of that knowledge, a part of the world they knew and he didn't.

And when Dante was thirteen and approached his mother one of these mornings, he asked her, "What are you looking for, mother?"

Teresa whirled around in surprise, then smiled sadly at him in a way reminiscent of Maggie, and replied, "A place far out of my reach." Taking the hint, Dante had left.

The next time he had seen his mother out there, he had taken up a paintbrush and sketched the scene: Resa, in front of the house gazing out into the distance, and in hazy gold he drew a path extending over the horizon: a path they longed for but none could follow.

He took the painting once it was dry and placed in his little box with Meggie's picture and his father's book. Over the course of the next year he took it out occasionally and added little touches here and there: four people, a man, two women and girl, standing on the road; the bright beast at the end, and stack of books next to it; a magical destination; a little boy watching them walk along the road with him left with his face pressed against a window, watching but not knowing where to go.

He finally added a tiny little flame flickering on the objects in the background, as if the dream was being lost, signed his name in the bottom right-hand corner, and it was done. Looking down at it, he knew his collection was complete.

He took the little box into the attic of their cottage and hid it under a large blanket that looked like it had at least a decade's worth of dust on it. And left it there. He went outside with his family, and strove to forget about it.

And eventually, he did.

And all through his childhood Dante wondered what that place was that they could see and he couldn't, and where it was, and why it could never return.

When Meggie married Doria and they started inventing those strange and wondrous things that made them so rich, Dante took note of one particular invention. They called it the motorcar.

For one day when he was nineteen and about to leave his parent's home for good, going through house and picking up his belongs to take with him, Dante found in the attic a strangely familiar box.

The moment he opened it, years' worth of memories came flooding back. Looking down at the painting, he remembered the day when he was fifteen and his parents and sister finally explained where they truly came from: the world his mother had always looked for on those early mornings, searching but never finding.

Looking down at the book, he remembered his father going through his collection of the foreign items, explaining all the concepts from the other world in them.

And looking at the photo, he remembered how his sister had told him that most of her inventions came from the ideas of the objects in the other world.

Until that moment, he hadn't really believed their tales; they hadn't seemed to really believe them themselves, as if it were some long-ago dream that had been lost in the halls of memory, as dreams are prone to do.

But now he knew it was all true.

For a moment, he entertained the idea of showing his family the box, resurrecting some of their old memories and showing them the evidence he had to remind them the other world existed.

But then he stopped.

It would not be a kind thing to do.

He hadn't woken up to his mother gazing out to the horizon in over three years. Meggie hadn't automatically reached for the empty photo frame on her table (she had never quite gotten around to getting rid of it) for two years before she left home when Dante was only eleven. And his father hadn't opened a otherworldly book since he had shown Dante them, explained them to Dante, four years ago.

And if he showed them the box, they would remember all those things from another world. And he would lose them to their dream of a different place. And their family would no longer be together. He would be the little boy pressed up against the window, and they would walk towards the fire and save the world, and he would be left behind... he couldn't let that happen.

No, it would not be a kind thing to resurface those particular memories, for any of them, now that they had finally settled down. It was time to let them go.

He took the box a far way into the the woods, and dug a small hole, making it just deep enough to fit the box and thirty centimetres of dirt. He then placed the box in the hole and covered it up as far as he could without creating a lump, and walked away back home.

He didn't look back.

 ** _Fin._**

 **A/N: There you go!**

 **Also, I am really near updating Year of Beginnings, but _will not update Molly Weasley's Prank Journal without at least_ one _review on chap_ _ter 9_!**

 **But anyway, hope to see some reviews on my little oneshot.**

 **Until next time!**

 **—RoyalRose161**


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